László Krasznahorkai: Waiting for this to be over…

James Wood once said of the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai that his “prose has a kind of self-correcting shuffle, as if something were genuinely being worked out, and yet, painfully and humorously, these corrections never result in the correct answer.” One might also say his prose is the answer to a question no one has ever asked, a solution to a puzzle no one ever puzzled over. It’s the kind of labyrinthine prose that seems to move of its own accord, leading one into an endless series of blind passages whose only reason for being is to allow you to enjoy the endless details of an insane world in its own act of vanishing…

As Baron Wenckheim tells us in Krasznahaorkai’s latest lost world of words:

“…I am the one— not creating anything— but who is simply present before every sound, because I am the one who, by the truth of God, is simply waiting for all of this to be over.”

—László Krasznahorkai, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming

It’s as if the apocalypse were a road show to nowhere and nowhen, a conversation between to voids collecting only the sounds of emptiness and fullness. Maybe like the two clown tramps in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot there is only the endless chatter of two minds seeking comfort against the silence which seems forever about to stop all conversation forever… it’s this need to keep the words going, this rush of energy, this mad endlessness of script surging from void to void without any rhyme or reason that keeps the universe from shutting down for good. Maybe in the end the mad Baron lies, and that he knows the truth: that if he ever does stop, his voice going dark and silent, that not only will the show end, but nothing will have ever been…